A hearing impaired person using a hearing instrument for compensating his/her hearing impairment can additionally be bothered by a tinnitus. A conventional approach for treating tinnitus is to emit a sound through the hearing instrument that either compensates the tinnitus noise by means of a destructive interference or that disturbs the source of the tinnitus, such as hair cells or subsequent auditory functionality, in generating the tinnitus. Such a conventional approach is, for instance, described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,047,074. This publication suggests treating tinnitus with a programmable hearing aid that includes a signal processing chain responsible for producing a useful signal by acting on an input signal in a manner to correct a hearing impairment of a wearer of the hearing aid.
In the publication “Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 107 (3): 1207-1210, 2010 authors H. Okamoto et al. describe a causal treatment approach of treating a tinnitus by targeting the tinnitus percept more directly. According to the described new approach, a chronic tinnitus patient is exposed to self-chosen music, which was notched to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the patient's tinnitus frequency. For instance, a frequency band of one octave width centered at the individual tinnitus frequency was removed from a music energy spectrum via a digital notch filter.